Fancy Aspirin: All dressed up with nowhere to go
There is a brand-new aspirin in town. Vazalore is not your grandpa’s baby aspirin. Its cutting-edge drug delivery technology applied to a classic medication to solve its eternal nagging problem. Bleeding risks exist, even if it is a rare adverse event the widespread use of the drug means there will always be a few cases. In the past this issue was enough of a justification to develop all new drugs. Cox-2 Inhibitors like Bextra, Vioxx, and Celebrex all came to the market claiming to be safer alternatives. Those drugs of course wound up having some negative cardiovascular effects resulting a black box warning for one and the other two being pulled from the market. Now years later we have a fancy new liquid filled aspirin capsule that addresses those bleeding concerns, and nobody seems to care.
Vazalore is a unique product that greatly improves absorption while reducing GI events. The liquid filled capsule contains an aspirin-phospholipid complex that is designed to be stable in low pH environments but dissolves at higher pH allowing for the drugs rapid absorption. This results in targeted drug delivery that avoids areas where it is most likely to cause damage to the mucosal lining of the stomach. This phospholipid delivery technology has the potential to be applied to many other drugs that can harm the lining of our stomachs which appears to negatively impact our microbiome and thus modulate overall immune function.
I doubt you will ever see other products using this technology because the company behind it has pretty much been smacked in the face by the market reality that nobody is interested in expensive aspirin. It might be cool and twice as safe with potentially better therapeutic effects but compared to regular aspirin it's 1000 times as expensive and nobody is interested in that. PLX Pharma is the company behind Vazalore and as you can see from the chart below things have not really gone to plan. The stock price hit an all-time high of 136 dollars in September of 2016, now you can load up for only a quarter a share.
Their mistake was going over the counter, if they had gone the prescription route where the obscene costs can be hidden behind the insurance system the drug may have been successful. I respect the drug company though for betting on their product and pursuing over the counter status. Unfortunately for them it appears to be a spectacular commercial failure. Even someone like me who takes aspirin daily and can appreciate all the things that make Vazalore awesome are yet to buy a bottle. Perhaps in a few years when my Costco sized baby aspirin runs out, then I will pick up some Vazalore, if it's still on the shelf. The harsh reality for PLX is that if you cannot sell fancy aspirin in this market with half the world freaking out about sudden cardiovascular death then you likely never will.
Jacob Hyatt Pharm D.
Father of three, Husband, Pharmacist, Realtor, Landlord, Independent Health and Medicine Reporter
www.pharmacoconuts.com
@Hyattjn
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Further reading and references
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36592127/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36601590/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36588714/
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40262-021-01090-2#citeas}
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11239-020-02051-5
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11239-019-01933-7
